The Paint Job That Turned Into a Kylie Minogue House.

Every builder has a story about the job they nearly turned down. This is ours, and it is the reason a lot of people first heard of NU.

When we started, we worked out of a small serviced office just off the King's Road. The phone rang one afternoon and it was an Australian lady. She had a job, she said, and could we come and look at a commercial unit in Fulham.

She was a PA, that much was clear, and she was working for someone with money, which was also clear. What was not clear was who. The unit was five thousand square feet in Hurlingham Business Park and it was completely empty. Plain walls, plain floors, nothing in it at all. She wanted it painted and decorated with commercial carpet down.

It was not really our thing. We were trying to build a design and build practice, not a decorating round. But we needed the money, so we said yes.

The flight case

We won the job and got on with it, painting, decorating, laying the floor, and the whole time trying to work out who on earth the client was.

Then one morning we turned up and there, in the middle of this empty unit, was an aluminium flight case about a metre and a half high. Down the side of it, in plain letters, it said Kylie Minogue World Tour.

We looked at each other. Then, because anyone would, we opened it. Inside was her tour wardrobe.

We did not say a word to the PA. We carried on and played dumb, and about a week later she rang and said her boss would like to meet us at a house in Chelsea.

The meeting

We rang the doorbell, somebody let us in and said Kylie is in the front room, she would like to meet you. We walked in and there she was on the sofa.

She looked up and said, I have heard all about you naughty boys. Then she sang us a little tune about NU, which neither of us had prepared for.

That meeting turned into the full refurbishment of a four and a half thousand square foot house, and a working relationship that ran for about two years.

Why the story matters, and it is not the name

It is a good story and we enjoy telling it. But the useful part is not the celebrity.

The useful part is that the work was won by turning up to a job we did not really want, doing it properly, and saying nothing when we worked out who the client was. Discretion was not a policy we wrote down. It was the thing that got us invited into the front room.

That is still how it works at the top of the London market. People with something to protect are not buying a brochure. They are working out whether you can be trusted in their house, with their staff, around their family, and whether you will talk about it afterwards.

We mostly do not. Most of the houses we are proudest of will never appear anywhere with a name attached.

What a full refurbishment of a house like that involves

Strip out and structural alterations, then the services the client never sees, heating, power, water and data, then joinery made for the house rather than bought for it, then the finishes. Architecture, interior design, project management and construction sit under one contract, so there is one team and one person accountable from the first drawing to handover.

Full renovation of a prime London house runs from £160 to £350 a square foot depending on specification and how much structure moves. Super prime work, where the finish and the joinery are bespoke throughout, runs from £500 to £800 a square foot.

One team. One contract. One standard. Only the address changes.

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Planning a renovation in Chelsea or anywhere in prime London?Talk to us. Architecture, interior design, project management and construction under one contract. CALL 020 7731 6841